Bringing Planet Of The Apes To Life | A Must See

Maybe you’re not in love with the premise or even a fan of the franchise. What the team has accomplished on this one is breathtaking at times. I fully intend to see this movie, even more so after reading this Verge article.

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about Rise of the Planet of the Apes was that it made you care for a character who you knew was responsible for the downfall of humanity.For the upcoming sequel Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, things get significantly more intense. The film takes place years after the original, when large swaths of the human population have been wiped out by the Simian Flu, and Caesar and the rest of the intelligent apes have slowly expanded their control of the planet. So not only are there a lot more CG apes performed by more motion-capture suit-wearing actors, but the world has changed as well.

“Certainly the greatest and most enjoyable challenge on Dawn was putting myself in the mind of the ape and trying to understand how they would take the next steps on their evolutionary journey,” production designer James Chinlund tells The Verge.

Since different types of simians live in different types of habitats, Chinlund and his team had to figure out what a society would look like that incorporated all of these creatures. “Using this information we tried to imagine what their first steps would be architecturally and began to design structures that would follow this logic…The increased scale has certainly allowed me to dream bigger,” Chinlund says. “Having said that, the work remains the same, in that my responsibilities are to deliver a cohesive world, that hopefully brings the audience into the picture and allows them to believe entirely in the world we have created.”